A recent survey shows that business owners and managers reflect the importance of maintaining your SEO efforts through the coming downturn while scaling back paid advertising. The survey of industries included business to business (24%), retail (12%), healthcare (11%), media (10%) and others (travel and hospitality, consumer technology, financial services, insurance, automotive, e-commerce and manufacturing).

Owners/managers anticipate reduced online budgets, but with campaign goals being the same or up. They indicated that their online marketing budgets are being impacted by the economic downturn. However, the majority of the survey respondents indicated that their budgets were only decreasing slightly or remaining the same. Only 20% were implementing large decreases in marketing, indicating the need to maintain a strong organic ranking position when the economy recovers.

SEO is a “race with no finish line” over time as businesses continually jockey for top page one positions with the search engines, particularly Google. The majority of survey participants anticipate that their marketing goals would be more difficult to reach this year. Over 60% felt that SEO would be more important due to the economic downturn. Only 5% indicated that SEO would be less important.